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If you're interested in locating some music sirens, here's a basic guide.
Music sirens were located at schools, universities, banks, factories, department stores, municipal offices, and notable historical sites. By 1955, 50 music sirens were already in place and sounding, and there were numerous music sirens installed between 1955-1960. This means there was a significant dropoff in music siren sales starting in the 60's. At that point, there were likely already music sirens playing in a majority of towns and cities everywhere.
Think about it- Yamaha Ginza stole Tokyo, Marubutsu stole Kyoto, Matsuzakaya occupied Nagoya as was Shizuoka, Fukuoka had the West Japan Bank right in downtown, Sendai had the iconic Marumitsu, Sapporo had Imai, Okayama installed their own music siren, Taiyo Department Store took Kumamoto, Niigata had Kobayashi, and the list really doesn't end.
Point is, your best bet for finding music sirens is to look at places you think they were installed at between 1952-1960. I'd suggest looking it up in Japanese. What do I mean by this? I found the Kobayashi music siren by typing in "小林百貨店 昭和35年". In English, that's 'Kobayashi Department Store, Showa 35'. Showa is the Japanese era, by the way, it started in 1925 and Showa 35 would be 1960. Global calendar works too if you add the Japanese Kanji for 'Year' after said year.
Do know that music sirens are sneaky, and can easily be mistaken for other things. Pictured is the Matsuya department store in Omuta from 1983, when its music siren had just gone inactive.
Can you see it? Perhaps if I highlight it on the right?
Isn't it strange how you know where it is in hindsight, but without someone taking up-close photos of it, you may have never found it?
Now that you know how to find photos of music sirens, you can start identifying them!
On the off chance you do somehow find an image of a music siren, your best bet is to post it to the ARS article or twitter. If you do use twitter, please @ me @musicsirenrt. I will retweet your post and try to dig into the location further.
You can find a music siren's approximate era of install using a method I like to use:
Using the gearbox on most music sirens, we can identify the approximate era the music siren was installed during by its design. Take a look at the gearbox on the Okayama Prefectural Government Office's music siren, highlighted in red. Note its design, and how it's angled. This was typical with music sirens installed before 1959.
You can also see this design with the Taiyo Kumamoto and Marumitsu music siren.
Now take a look at the design with Omuta Matsuya's music siren. It's much simpler, as it's... just a box. This is the modern style you'll occasionally see, and this is how we also know that TOKIWA's music siren was indeed a replacement for their older unit.
You might also notice some music sirens' dampers are missing ports on the top, it's unknown why this is. I'd say,.don't worry about it. It probably relates to air pressure and siren pitch, and it's been there since the beginning on about half the models. (You can actually see this with the E and F2 dampers on Iga's music siren.)
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